Well, your knowledge of the fantasy genre clearly outweighs mine, so I’m just gonna grant you most of your points. I’m still a n00b to this stuff, and I was mainly just looking for answers anyhow. I still refuse to believe that adding in another race automatically has to incur some sort of reference to current racial issues or even political correctness. Fantasy books already ask a lot of the reader as far as disbelieving current ideas of what humanity is capable of. I mean, who REALLY believes in magic or any of this crap, but yet when we read a fantasy novel we accept it because we understand that it is another world. So why are we to assume that if their exists say, a dark-skinned race of people or some such that the groups of people in this other world would have a relationship to each other that even moderately resembles our current one? But again, this is really just my opinion, and some people here have made references to works that do this, so perhaps I will have to check these out for myself. As I said before, I’m a sociology major, so perhaps I’m seeing more in this issue than there really is, hehehe…